


Fallen

by lodessa



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Adultery, Biblical References, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-24
Updated: 2006-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-07 14:09:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/432018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/pseuds/lodessa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The blank faces of the children don't haunt her; his image keeps them out. Half memory and half invention, it cuts sharper than the splitting they do here, and nowhere near as cleanly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fallen

Well meaning pious people always ask her how she can do it; doesn't the thought of the little zombies keep her up at night? She always replies that she is doing God's work and her conscience is too clean for any doubt. 

The blank faces of the children don't haunt her; his image keeps them out. Half memory and half invention, it cuts sharper than the splitting they do here, and nowhere near as cleanly. 

Marisa brushes her hair with a gilded comb and sets it up in pins. Back then she'd worn it down, flowing and free. There was a lightness in her step, a naive innocence that did not recognize the implications of her flushed cheeks. She was pretty, young, and well off. She knew it too. Marisa danced every dance for an entire season of grand parties, until she met him, and suddenly it was as if the music evaporated. 

Marisa remembers how cool air caressed her burning skin, exposed by her fashionable and becoming attire, but she cannot remember a thing Asriel said in that first evening, the first few weeks even. 

She didn't understand it then, didn't question it. Everything in this world seemed inviting and wholesome then. Marisa is certain that if her current self were to look at the tableau they presented then, she would literally be able to see the Dust swirling around them, thick and heavy with warning. She knew nothing of it then, however. She was Eve before the fall, reaching for the fruit that would lead to her damnation. 

No more, she thinks, taking down notations and weighing the feasibility of different implementations. Their faces do not bother her because she sees him instead and remembers the brush of his fingertips, the fine linen of hotels, the ring of laughter on her lips. 

They see nothing, remember nothing, and suffer from nothing. 

His touch is constant in its absence. The tears were cried years ago, the vases broken, and the reality set in. Marisa knows what Dust brings. 

His mysterious smile and his warm lips, Satan was the most beautiful of all the angels, so beloved.

Marisa is a very attractive woman. She knows it more surely than she knew even that she was a lovely girl. Not a crease where there shouldn't be, not a bulge out of place. 

The thing inside her had definitely been out of place. She'd known even as she looked at Asriel's face while the words to explain had come out of her mouth. That was after the arguments had already started… the broken plans. 

Leah begged God to grant her a child. God thought that sons would heal the distance between Rachel and Jacob, make a wholeness where there were only crack. Leah died in childbirth. The strife brought by God's gift to Rachel ended in slavery and exile.

Marisa did not die in labor; more's the pity.

Dust clings to her, and she can never get clean. Rumor has it that Asriel is somewhere on the borders of civilization. She brushes her hair, a hundred even strokes, and neatly puts it up in perfect symmetry. The children’s faces are not the ones that come to mind.


End file.
